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sciencehabit writes "Scientists are expressing fresh concerns about the carbon locked in the Arctic's vast expanse of frozen soil. New field studies quantify the amount of soil carbon at 1.9 trillion metric tons, suggesting that previous estimates underestimated the climate risk if this carbon is liberated. Meanwhile, a new analysis of laboratory experiments that simulate carbon release by thawed soil is bolstering worries that continued carbon emissions could unleash a massive Arctic carbon wallop."

Sitting at my personal computer, with another in my pocket, both connected to a world-wide network that allows formerly unimaginable near instantaneous communication, let me say that, "Scientists don't know nuthin' - they're just shills in it for the big bucks and I don't believe a word that they say!!!11!"

the methane in the oceans is much more of a threat. but we could harvest that and burn it off, which would solve two birds with one stone. It is much better to fear-monger over things we can't do anything about.

Harvesting methane that was going to be emitted anyhow (because of how much we have goosed the climate for the next few centuries with the GHGs we've already emitted) and burning it is a net "win" (which is to say, it is a smaller loss, not an actual win). Otherwise, you get methane's potent effects in the atmosphere for a few decades, then it converts to the same CO2 we would have had from burning it.

Another unhappy thing I learned today, from a friend who works in the nuclear industry, is that the combin

Well, *if* we could harness it (it's pretty spread out and working on the ocean bottom isn't exactly easy) burning it off *might* be an improvement over letting it escape, if only because CO2 is a weaker greenhouse gas than methane. On the other hand it might actually make things much worse in the long term since methane has a very short lifetime in the atmosphere, while CO2 remains there for several decades, probably far longer now that the uptake cycles have been saturated.

No idea. I have no expertise in the subtleties of atmospheric chemistry, do you? Conversion to water and CO2 seems like a reasonable assumption, but can you cite the vector by which that conversion occurs? For all I know its limited life could be due to being consumed by atmospheric microbes that covert it into cellulose which eventually becomes incorporated into soil.

Am I just not picking up on the sarcasm? (It's not in your mode specification.) Maybe I'm trying to over explain the joke.

connected to a world-wide network that allows formerly unimaginable near instantaneous communication

Unfortunately it allows both good and bad communication. There's plenty of information out there, and there's also plenty of garbage and misinformation out there. And sometimes it can be hard to know which is which.

I remember some popular web site running this story about NASA finding

There's just no chance that the people with money who pay the people with guns will be able to see beyond their lust for more power and more money. This means things will go to hell with large amounts of certainty.

If there were profit in saving the world [from those who put us there] then they would be interested in saving the world. They have no interest in that. They might entertain the notion if they were guaranteed to come out on top and in control once the crisis was averted, of course, because this is all about giving up power and control.

I am an army of one. I cannot make a difference. But if I saw an army of many marching down the street, I would be inclined to join.

And beyond this, the denial is STILL out there being preached. First they said "it's not real!" Then they said "it's not our fault! It's nature!" Yet in any of this none are willing to make changes or do anything about it. But I don't blame the businesses entirely. It reminds me of the economy of slavery.

There was a town near New Orleans which abolished slavery before Lincoln did. The surrounding areas, of course, did not. Before long, local business could not compete with outside business. This town was forced into allowing slavery once again. Lincoln was successful because it was a unilateral decision. Individuals cannot make an effective change. Small groups cannot make an effective change. It takes unilateral change in order to work.

So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.

So you see, the kind of change we require is simply impossible without world war. And that kind of war is simply not going to happen.

And so I say, I'm ready for things to go to hell. I can't imagine a way out that is likely.

I am assuming your are British by your post. But in the States the change can be far more drastic and different as we have semi arid and arid climates in the central and western sections. Go google the "Dustbowls"? They almost destroyed the US agriculture in the 1930s as the dust storms swamped crops for thousands of miles.

Land is leased and owned by investors with 30 year leases. It is changing so quickly you can't just switch crops. In a dry region you could grow corn in a wet year but wheat is a better b

The people in US who don't deny the existence of climate change will keep on blaming China and India as a scapegoat. Meanwhile, it's US, Canada, New Zealand, Russia, and a few other countries which are holding up any kind of international progress from taking place.China leads the world in renewable energy investment.http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/07/27/china-leads-the-world-in-renewable-energy-investment/ [forbes.com]I think it's time to get your head out of the sand and admit that you are part of the problem.

Citation please? As far as I know there's no reason to believe that the US reduces its carbon emissions at all. The only reduction seems to be from the economic problems in 2008 - which should hardly count as successful energy policy.

That graph only lists carbon emissions for energy demand though, not total greenhouse gas emissions. But it's something at least. And I do accept that gas is better than coal (wrt CO2 emissions). What I don't accept is that growing your economy should have any influence on the assessment of this development - I doubt the climate cares that the US only increased it's emissions slightly (before the recent downturn) while growing its economy. The total emissions matter in this context, the economy does not.

My problem with the entire AGW issue is that people don't seem to look at it from the economic perspective. The costs of cutting emissions enough to make even a little difference is huge, and not enough to save us. Even without the thawing methane issue many of the models say we are on course for a 4+ degree rise, and doing enough to slow that by 2 degrees could consume almost our entire GDP! Meanwhile the models also indicate the geo-polictical situation as we know it won't tolerate more than 2 degrees.

The global warming discussion started a VERY long time ago. Concern over emissions and pollution have been an issue for as long as I can remember... so just over 40 years. Things could have been done... should have been done. Not much has actually been done.

What stupid things have been done? Like "taxing" polution. Seriously. And the rate of taxation was lower than the cost of fixing the problem so guess which way business went? And what was done with the money? It went back into the "enconomy" and by that I mean the major players who are also major polluters.

Taxing was a stupid idea. Making them ineligible for government contracts would have been the way to go.

My problem with the entire AGW issue is that people don't seem to look at it from the economic perspective. The costs of cutting emissions enough to make even a little difference is huge, and not enough to save us.That is your perception. But it is not true. On the other hand: the perception is always the truth in the eye of the perceptee... so dream on.

So even if the whole US stopped CO2 and other emissions today, it wouldn't matter because China and others are simply not going to change.It would matte. As 1/3rd of the CO2 emissions would be gone.Also you are wrong in the assumption that others are simply not going to change.

Right now only the USA are not changing, all over the world countries try to limit or reduce their CO2 output.

The resource we will run out of is useful land. Climate change is weather change. Weather change directly affects the land which affects the food supply.

The fun part is that we get a lof of our food from places like Mexico. Farming in the US has become too screwed up.

The costs of resources is a problem in that perhaps the price of non-renewables is too low. I smell a little strategy in that. The price of natural gas, a fossil fuel and non-renewable and emitting greenhouse exhaust is lower than getting

The problem I have with the global warming scaremongers is the so called "solutions" most of them propose to fix it. Almost every solution proposed involves more government, more taxes, and less freedom.So you are losing freedoms when the power coming from your plug is generated by solar, wind, waves, biomass? But you have freedom when it is generated by nuclear or coal? Hu?

On the other hand we have "big wind", an industry that relies on government mandates to remain profitable. Very few people would buy wi

Yes, I do realize that. What you need to realize is that no matter how much people wish that wind, solar, wave, and bio-fuels were viable alternatives to fossil fuels that physics "does not give one single fuck about your ideology".

I have grown very tired of seeing my tax dollars spent on companies that promise solar panels, electric cars, windmills, and so much more that claim to provide a better world for us all but don't deliver. We have something that can give us this better world but the government h

I don't think we've yet found enough carbon for the positive feedback loop to take Earth all the way to being like Venus, however.... On the other hand, there's lots of room to be screwed long before you get to Venus status.

Honestly. I am _ALWAYS_ buried into oblivion when this topic comes up without receiving a single honest response. I worked at a small soda bottler for a while and we had multiple semi tankers FULL of carbon dioxide delivered every week. If carbon dioxide is so damaging what about all of it that we're pumping into sodas? "Save the Planet but don't touch my cola"?

Those tankers contain, what, a half-dozen tons of CO2? Probably less than that; the truck can only carry a few dozen tons and the containers themselves far outweigh the mass of the CO2.

The worldwide CO2 output is on the order of 30 BILLION tons of CO2. All the soda bottlers in the entire world don't add up to a rounding error.

There, you have an answer. Which you could probably have figured out all by yourself, but I'm sure you enjoy the fact that anonymity means you can ask this all over in the next CO2 thread and pretending nobody ever gives you an answer.

a) it's only a small amount of CO2 compared to the gigatons pumped out by coal stations, transport networks etc. Hell, the trucks probably emit more CO2 a week than what they were carrying.

b) I bet that CO2 comes from the air in the first place - as a side product of oxygen compressors, a useful medical and industrial product. Easy way to get a pure source. In which case, who cares? Carbon leaving the air and going back to it fairly soon afterwards is not the problem, such as burning new wood or crops. Its

One thing that's readily apparent and not disputed is that our planet's temperature takes wild swings [wikipedia.org]. It's seldom stable, which it seems to have been for several thousand years now. Perhaps our resolution isn't good enough or there's too much noise in the historical data, but it would seem that we live in exceptional times. For the whole system to be able to oscillate that widely, and on relatively short timescales, it MUST be sensitive to positive feedback loops. Runaway processes are apparently the rule rather than the exception.

This is not to say anything one way or the other about the forcing mechanism. I do believe humans have had an awful lot to do with it this time around. What we didn't realize is that it's like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill. Either he's rolling it slowly and steadily upward, or it's inexorably moving downhill when he loses control. It may start slowly at first, but once it gets going it's nearly impossible to stop.

I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.

I don't think we as a species are totally fucked, but I do think a whole lot of people are going to die before this all settles out.

I agree. I estimate that more than seven billion people will die before this all settles out. I say that because this is something that will take a lifetime to play out.

Even if this "carbon bomb" does go off it will take decades, if not centuries, for the planet to warm to a point where it makes any significant effect on our lives. In that time a lot of things of much greater significance could happen.

For example, we could have a volcanic eruption that spews up so much debris that we could be thankful we

From what we know of how we treat the environment, our current methods and technologies for energy production, distribution, and consumption are hugely wasteful , non-renewable, and incredibly toxic to the biosphere (erm, yes, that thing we currently have ONLY ONE of).

I respectfully disagree. Nuclear power has been shown to be cheap, safe, reliable, and have a very small carbon footprint. With the use of thorium fuel, reprocessing of "spent" fuel (you know, recycling?) we will have enough energy for all of humanity until the sun consumes the atmosphere.

I won't disagree that the climate is changing. I'm just having difficulty to both believe that this is all caused by human activity and giving a damn. Assuming that we did cause the acidification of the oceans and so f

I notice your graph ends in 1950 and so doesn't cover the last 60+ years where nearly all of the human cause warming has occurred. I suspect the originator of the graph you're using, Richard Alley [wikipedia.org] would say you are misusing it to try and say something it doesn't say.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that we've long since fucked ourselves over - and the explosion of industrialization in China and India is just sealing the deal. Even if you ignore China and India, we appear to have built up so much momentum that even if we drastically curtailed our carbon and methane outputs (like from the cattle industry) instantly, we're still screwed.

There's a 30 year lag from the introduction of additional CO2 to when it's full effects are felt. So you are correct, even stopping now we would still continue to reap the "benefits" of a warming planet for several decades.

With our current planetary political insanity when it comes to AGW, I'm expecting we're going to ride this thing whole hog up to the 6C warming mark. When numerous species die off, farmlands become deserts or infested with invasive species, coastal

"The worst" as far as the US is concerned isn't all that bad: southern states will suffer, northern states will benefit.

Nope, not really - as evidenced by the last hurricane. It's not as simple as "cold places get warmer, hot places get hotter."

The UK, for example, is royally fucked - they rely on the jetstream for warm air. If the jetstream continues to shift or is disrupted (as it will, as the arctic melts - the cool temperatures in the arctic are necessary), England will freeze.

The summary is missing the fine print, namely that this is 13% more than previous estimates and amounts to about 2 years of human carbon emissions. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen two years earlier. Sure, it's an interesting scientific result, but hardly big news.

If the previous climate science was any good, meaning that future estimates were unbiased expressions of the best available current knowledge, then p = 0.5 that any single factor they drill into produces either more (or less) than previously estimated.

If the media coverage is unbiased, we hear about both cases equally often. For every "Oh my god we're all going to die" headline there's a corresponding headline "Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead" (apparently this headline once made it past a sleepy n

This is nothing other than egghead research "scientists" trying to keep the gravy train going and looking for more of our (yours and mine) money to sit on their asses and debate the issue.

Roight, guv. Basic scientific research is so much more profitable than shilling for Big Oil. The National Science Foundation has so much more money and so much less to spend it on than ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and Fox Izvestia.

This is nothing other than egghead research "scientists" trying to keep the gravy train going and looking for more of our (yours and mine) money to sit on their asses and debate the issue.

Roight, guv. Basic scientific research is so much more profitable than shilling for Big Oil. The National Science Foundation has so much more money and so much less to spend it on than ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and Fox Izvestia.

I wonder if the people that make that argument are aware of how little a slice of those "big" NSF grants actually go into the scientists' own pockets. For typical university scientisst, a $10,000,000 grant means that several of them earn 1-3 months of summer salary for 3-5 years, at they same monthly that they get paid during the school year, which is to say between "somewhat" and "a lot" less than the pay rate of scientists in industry.

(You forgot to mention AAAAALLLLL GOOOOORRRRRE!)

And United Nations, New World Order, Liberal Plot to Destroy capitalis

Let's look at this like intelligent human brings and not fucking retards. Who has the most to gain by all of this? Do you actually believe scientists are going t join together in a vast cabal to deceive people about AGW for research grants?

Fuckinghell the pseudo skeptics are abandoning any notion of reasoned debate. I don't know whether to pity you or mock you.

Let's look at this like intelligent human brings and not fucking retards. Who has the most to gain by all of this? Do you actually believe scientists are going t join together in a vast cabal to deceive people about AGW for research grants?

Fuckinghell the pseudo skeptics are abandoning any notion of reasoned debate. I don't know whether to pity you or mock you.

That is, incidentally, exactly the position that creationists take.

When the evidence overwhelmingly supports a conclusion you don't like, invent a conspiracy.

Yes, I recognize that I believe that the energy sector is deliberately trying to cast doubt on scientific facts and conclusions.

Outrageous, I know. It's like accusing the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries of peddling their products even when they have evidence that they kill people, or Enron staging power outages to influence an election.

Everyone should know that corporations embody all that is good in our species, and would never cause, or even allow, harm for financial gain.

And that science has always been a hotbed of corruption, and people who fake results are put on a pedestal instead of kicked out of their field in irreparable disgrace. And anyone who has a new idea *is* kicked out in disgrace, because it threatens the flow of money to the established interests.

I'm not a global warming skeptic. But having done grant research for many years, I can say that yes, the imperative to keep the money flowing tremendously skews science. Its not a conspiracy so much as thousands of individual choices about what to look at and what not to look at for the sake of the next grant cycle. But the end result is much the same. A science illiterate person who understands this can't tell who to trust. Similar situation with evolution. The science is really, really solid, and the counter-arguments are complete bunk. But a non-expert can't always evaluate that. And although its true that a person can't make much of a living as a scientist, its usually easier to win government research money than to find funding from a private company. Private companies just aren't spending money on research in most fields, and where they are its often not being spread around as widely.

Its true of course that skeptics' views on this sort of thing are skewed by dishonest selfishness and stupidity: its OK to trash the planet because Jesus will come fix it all for us. Global warming aside, it astounds me that a valuable resource has been accumulating for a half billion years and 'conservatives' want to pump it all out and burn it in a couple hundred. And pumping water and toxic chemicals into the ground to shatter the rock is to me twice again as stupid. That's what's going to happen though, no matter who is in charge. Oil companies have done pretty well under Obama. Best case scenario for people on the left is to use global warming as a pretext for steering investment money in a healthier direction. But its also true that some of that amounts to a power grab. Its not as if anything is actually going to be done about the global warming problem, the problem is too big. Its kind of like bailing out a flooded ship with a teaspoon. Unlike with other easier kinds of pollutant problems, a little bit of effort doesn't help much.

I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.

If you are just concerned about 'life' flourishing, then it doesn't really matter what the climate is or will be. Life will find a way. If, however, you are concerned about keeping the majority of human beings, and especially 'first world' human beings safe and snug in their high tech cocoons, then you should be very concerned about any abrupt change in any one of a number of critical environmental variables - climate, water, air, fossil fuels, food.

If you haven't noticed, our current civilization doesn't like abrupt change. One little hurricane causes significant damage. A multi year drought causes food prices to rise which causes food riots. A modest rise in fuel costs slows the economy down to much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.

And those are tiny little disruptions in the grand scheme of things. Now, dramatically change how and where crops are grown, change how and where water falls and rivers rise and fall. Change major weather patterns. Displace a billion people, And add that to the stresses the system is under.

No, it's not the end of the world, however it may be the end of the world as we know it. The US can't even effectively deal with two large cities (New York, New Orleans) getting inundated in the space of a decade. Now, imagine doubling or tripling the problem. Doesn't look pretty. So yes, the planet has survived larger climate shifts. You, on the other hand, might not be so lucky.

"If you are just concerned about 'life' flourishing, then it doesn't really matter what the climate is or will be. Life will find a way. If, however, you are concerned about keeping the majority of human beings, and especially 'first world' human beings safe and snug in their high tech cocoons, then you should be very concerned about any abrupt change in any one of a number of critical environmental variables - climate, water, air, fossil fuels, food."

Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert and the thin, acidic boreal soils of Canada will be warmer, thin, acidic non boreal soils. And the Canadians might have a less than encouraging view of Iowa trying to annex Alberta.

Even more important - Northern Europe / Northern Asia might feel somewhat put out if several billion Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakastanis and various other refugees tried to come north. And so on.

It is no where as simple nor as anywhere as benign as abandoning coastal human settlements and moving them uptown. You see how much trouble is involved in siting a few million people in the Middle East (the Israeli - Palestinian dispute)? Try that worldwide. Try that worldwide and having the ground rules (so to speak) change over the course of a couple of decades.

THE MAJOR PROBLEM ISN'T THE FACT THAT THE PLANET IS CHANGING. It is that the carrying capacity for Homo Stupidicus is limited and we appear to be bumping up to those limits. We aren't there yet, but we are definitely moving along at a brisk pace. As you do that, your OPTIONS BECOME LIMITED. Moving into your neighbor's house may not go over well with your neighbor. We aren't doing such a stellar job at managing civilization at present, even without a whole lot of hard constraints.

There is a reason that the old prayer 'May no new thing arise' is just that - a prayer.

A someone who used to live in Alaska I can tell you the summers are wetter and cooler even if the winters are milder. Cold wet rains hurt food production in Alberta. You might have more hot summer days where that never occured decades ago but the cold rains that normally would be spread further south hurt as much as the shorter growing season in the past.

It's not the over-all temperatures that are what is the concern, although that does have an effect. The main concern is the melting of the polar ice caps and other glaciated regions. Adding a lot of fresh water to the worlds oceans is affecting the oceanic Gyres, the most critical currently being affected is the north Atlantic Gyre. Since the arctic ice caps started melting at a previously unprecedented rate the current has measurably slowed down. We currently cannot prove 100% that this isn't a natural cycle, but there are strong indications that this is caused by climate change.

You might wonder why the Gyre is so important ( other than ocean health and bio-balance )... without that Gyre England and other European countries would not have the nice climates they have now. England would have roughly the same climate as Nova Scotia / northern Canada / Greenland. This would affect ( shorten ) the growing season of the Russian steppes as well - one of the worlds bread baskets for grain production.

The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.

The reason the Cretaceous period was so populous was because where the life was most abundant the continental masses had all been situated in the tropical and subtropical zone. That is the sweet spot for life, seasons don't change a whole lot, there is no real "winter" with snow and freezing weather. Life can flourish when hunting / gathering / grazing can be done year round with no compelling reason storage or the requirement for adaptations to colder climates for at the very least part of the year. Today there is not very much landmass ( comparatively ) situated in those zones, and even less that is situated near those zones that isn't dependent on current weather patterns that would be changed if the climate was significantly warmer or cooler.Much of the world would either die off or use all and in most cases orders of magnitude more of the current energy usage just for heating and growing what food would be possible, the weather patterns would be drastically different as well as being much more violent ( the Cretaceous period has records of huge wildfire cycles as well as floods that make anything in recorded history look like trickles ) and basically the world would be a drastically different place.

I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind.

The climate warming / cooling is not the concern. The Earths climate naturally does that in long, slow cycles that generally allow ecological adaptation. What is concerning is how fast it is happening, several orders of magnitude faster than ever seen before - even from environmental dating done to hundreds of millions of years ago, fast enough that the ecological strata cannot adapt fast enough.

The possibility that climate change will be beneficial ( even in the long run ) is not zero, however from our best projections from extrapolating data from slower changes into a model with faster changes it will most likely be detrimental short term ( "short" being relative, meaning years to millenia ) and either detrimental or non affective long term.

We know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in the climate the way it is.

We don't know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in a Cretaceous-like climate.

Therefore we would like to see the climate stay as much the way it is as we can manage.

What the right wingers aren't getting is that this is the conservative position, at least as "conservative" used to be defined. We like the climate the way it is. A "progressive" position might be "CO2 supports plant life, higher temperatures are good, let's raise the temperature." No sane person believes that. The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!" That's not conservative and it certainly isn't progressive. It's reckless.

I recognize that global climate is going to warm up no matter *what* we do, and suggest that we should prepare for it (while debunking the claim that it's bad for "life" or farmland), and that makes me a fool? Sorry, but no. The fools are the ones that think anything we do can *stop* the coastlines from being put underwater. It's going to happen, and it does not matter if mankind causes it or not. We should be spending our limited time and resources preparing for something that is inevitable rather than trying to prevent something that is inevitable.

I don't think anyone thinks we can control *whether* coastal cities go underwater. We can just make it happen much more slowly by slowing the rate of warming. Many skeptics think that accepting AGW means thinking that we have complete and total control of the climate, which clearly isn't the case. We can control the part of climate change that is caused by human activities, which at this point seems to be most of the change in the past several decades.

Likewise, you're going to die some day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about your health because you're going to die no matter what you do.

By the definition that cryologists and climate scientists use an ice age is any period when there are significant ice sheets on the Earth. Like Antarctica and Greenland. Within the ice age there are cycles of glacials when the continental ice sheets advance and interglacials when they retreat./pedant

But in the popular vernacular ice age refers to a glacial cycle so it's an easy mistake to make.

If right wing types would just accept the evidence for global warming, they could start coming up with right wing solutions for it. There's nothing about global warming which says it MUST have left wing solutions...it's just that left wing types are the only ones even putting forward solutions. This is perhaps the worst thing about the right wing refusal to face global warming...it's depriving us of half of the possible spectrum of solutions to the problem.

Right - absolutely nothing wrong - look at Mars - still exists, total desert. Who cares in an universal scale. On a more local scale, not the first civilization messing up - Easter Islands, Maya, Ancestral Puebloans and what else there is. Only difference here is that it's much more massive as well as the amount of idiocy of some people. Even Gorillas know not to totally raid leaf trees for food so they can regrow.

I don't see what's so bad about global warming, especially looking out my window right now and seeing snow on the roofs of the outbuildings.

The eastern USA and NW Europe may be in for another snow-intensive winter because of global warming. If you'd like to take a break from your knee-jerk denialism and actually learn something interesting, pick up a copy of the current Scientific American and read about the mechanism.

Trust me, "scientists" don't spend 8-10 years as a student (plus more as a post-doc usually), making no money to get rich. They are mostly just intelligent, curious people with a desire to know how the world works. Your typical "scientist" isn't hauling in the cash and most of them work at tenured jobs where they'd get paid regardless of what they publish. Besides, at this point you're not grabbing anyone's attention when you say that climate change is real and that humans are at least part of the cause. Th

Yes. And since that will benefit some and harm others, the prospect of a global unified effort to prevent it - which is required - is pretty much not going to happen. Do you think Russia is really opposed to global warming? Look at a globe.

And what if some don't want to cooperate, or want to put crushing conditions on it? What if canada decides they want to jack up the price of grain to extortionate levels?

If short term self interest dominates the AGW debate now, do you think those who hold the cards in 50 or 100 years will be any different?

Beyond that, why not start now? Do you think that once AGW is seriously fucking up the global economy and food supply that we will be in a better position? Or are we just going to foist this on to our grandchildren?

Why don't we just admit it. Because we can't actually meet the people who post here, because we know almost nothing about their REAL background or history, we have no real way of knowing whether the poster is (a) a paid shill who makes his living posting well crafted propaganda, (b) a gullible idiot who reads and believes said propaganda or (c) a well meaning citizen who actually cares about scientific truth.

At least when I actually know someone, then they are accountable for what they say. If they say so

you seem to be under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer and have no other effect.

But I submit that there is a strong possibility that in addition to making the planet nicer, it is pretty likely that the measures taken will also increase human misery and suffering, and may even result in wide-scale death.

Indeed, depopulation is one of the measures that you see proposed here on slashdot a lot. I assume by people who think they will be members of the group that g

I am not under the misapprehension that the action of "too much" will only make the planet nicer. Obviously, excessive/misdirected resources spent on any problem X can mean less resources available to spend on other problems not X. However, while we might expand the table to take this into account, we are then expanding the scope of the matrix beyond X. This is an initial approach matrix, not a comprehensive systems analysis.

Secondly, you mention depopulation as a solution proposed by others th

You confuse "global warming proponents" (by which I assume you mean lobbyist and such who are trying to convince the world that global warming is real) with "climate researchers".

The latter have reached an overwhelming consensus that anthrogenic global warming is real, and to deny that that is a "reasoned scienctific view" is right up there with denying evolution or the germ theory of disease, saying they're all just political movements.

It is true that there are some in the political area who have cried wolf or who have oversold things. But to deny the utter and overwhelming reality of the results of vast quantities of climate scientists (including some who came in skeptical when they started, but realized that, hey, the data say what the data say) is simply wrong.

I'm open to the idea of both sides of the AGW argument. Where I have an issue is the government mandates to "fix" the problem but really only serve to take money from my pocket and move it to the pockets of charlatans. These people will claim to have the solution to all of our energy needs but only if the government gives them large quantities of my money. If these people really had the solution to cheap and clean energy then they should be able to convince me to give them my money with out having to hav